Dear Colleagues

Teaching literature to homeless people. The idea sounds fabulous. Its just the sort of project I'd love to get involved in. In this country I'm not sure we have shelters for the homeless, though since the advent (c.1990) of the market economy (the euphemistic term for 'capitalism'), one can see poor people scavenging in the garbage cans. And homeless kids living in and around railway stations... Gypsies are the worst affected and, of course, the old age pensioners, too, are having a very hard time. Their monthly pensions are barely enough to tide them over two weeks (or less). If it wasn't for the extended family, which is somehow still holding, the elderly, the sick, and the addicts would be dying in the streets by the hundreds. It would take too long to explain why so many people are now falling through the cracks, so to speak. In a nutshell it is on account of the former communist top echelons transmogrifying into budding capitalists after having plundered the banks, industry and agriculture. This goes by the name of 'privatization', and is therefore a good thing.

We have evening school for high-school drop-outs and night classes at some universities. But that would come under adult education.

But teaching the homeless is something quite different. These people don't know where their next meal is coming from, and have nothing but the clothes on their backs, nowhere to get a wash... I was just asking myself "Do I have the courage to start this here?" To begin with there would be no money available. Then the setting is different, the mind set too. The average wage is US$80 per month. Hyperinflation all but eliminated pension and insurance funds in the short space of one year. The market is shrinking because consumption has shrunk. And I, a privileged professor teaching at the American University in Bulgaria, am offering to teach literary and art appreciation... "To what end" I would be asked. Pragmatic-minded as Bulgarians tend to be, the scheme would be ridiculed as something worse than Quixotic. If I were to start a soup kitchen, that would be regarded as answering a definite need. But discussing literature or the fine arts or the life of Socrates or Jesus would at the very least raise eye-brows. My sanity would be questioned. "For goodness sake, there's a war raging next door. Our brothers in Macedonia are extremely worried that they'll get sucked in and then it's us and the Albanians and then God only knows what ..." I hear pundits objecting. "So ostrich-like, balding professors and disheveled unwashed students will bury their heads in the sands of abstract knowledge for the sake of the pleasure of learning something. "O la belle chose que de savoir quelque chose" exclaims Moliere's Gentleman (How wonderful it is to know something -- in his case learning that the shape of the letter 'O' derives from the rounding of the lips). And how many souls will be saved in the process, may we ask?"

All I could reply would be to say that virtue is its own reward or that during the World War II shivering Poles went to hear classical music in a bombed out concert hall in Warsaw. And Stanley and Livingston kept up (Western) standards by wearing evening dress complete with bow ties at their historic meeting in the Congo jungle.

Well, I suppose teaching is its own reward as well, or few of us would, after so many years, still be at it. Though the project would not be as daunting as reporting on women's issues in Taliban Afghanistan, it would certainly take a very very dedicated teacher to take the plunge. A kind of academic Mother Teresa. Hats off! I stand in admiration, but am hesitant about following suit.

Such, I am sorry to say, would seem to be the perspective on this project from points east of Vienna.

Bogdan Atanasov
Professor of English, American University in Bulgaria

Max:

The Great Ideas tapes arrived on Monday. I listened to the first 30 minute segment on Learning and I am already thrilled. The packaging is great, the sound quality is wonderful, and hearing Dr. Adler speak is a treat beyond words. Given that the show occurred 40 years ago, that the content is so rich and edifying, that I am probably in a segment of about .1% who is actually privy to it, it feels, as someone in your newsletter once said in describing the whole concept of the Center, 'strange and wonderful'!

High points for me: The relationship between learning and teaching. Aided and unaided discovery. Socrates the model teacher. The need for arousing interest in the student. The difference between education and learning. The distinctions between intellectual, moral, and emotional learning. Learning and growth. The problem with so-called child-centered learning. John Dewey on learning.

With 51 segments ahead of me, I will be taking notes and trying to 'suck the marrow' out of each portion of this learning adventure. And ideally, I will learn something which I can pass on to my children and perhaps my fellow man. (Not to mention my great books club! I guess that would qualify as my fellow man)

What can I say for now but thank you Max, I will keep in touch, please pass on my heartfelt awe and respects to Dr. Adler, take care for now.

Brent Milligan
Alberta

Dear Mr. Adler:

Though I thoroughly agree with your account of "multicultural" and "transcultural"--how they differ and how they are related, I think you have not yet adequately addressed the issue of pluralism vs. relativism raised by Mr. Murray's query.

Let us grant the worldwide uniformity of the Transcultural, and the local diversity of the cultural which requires an understanding and tolerance for the diversity of cultures, i.e. multiculturalism. But the differences between us are hardly exhausted by the fact that there are many cultures. The various forms and regions of human diversity need to be addressed more fully.

Cultures are not simply matters of taste, of preferences for one option over others. A culture is a way of life, or at least a large part of the way of life of many individuals who thereby have some claim to constituting a community. As such cultural forms and ways of doing things are much more fundamental than a more or less arbitrary preference for, e.g. theater over movies, or Shakespeare over Tolstoy (to pick only examples of good taste). There is a real case to be made that insofar as the culture in which and by which each of us lives shapes our ways of, e.g. forming marriages and families, raising our children, engaging in public affairs, holding a job and having a career, etc. These are not matters of taste, but fundamental dimensions of our practical and ethical lives and as such they powerfully affect our way of life and our sense of human excellence.

Human excellence, virtue, is, of course, partly determined by our natures as human beings, but it is not exclusively determined by nature. (If it were Ethics would be a natural science, not a practical science.) Human excellence is also in part determined by our contingent lives in community, by the character of our communities, on all levels, i.e. of the family, our friendships, the local community, and the nation. And not every community is the same as every other, but the different ways of doing things in different communities may be equally reasonable and excellent. Justice, for example is a virtue, but does justice require a trial by jury or can a trial by a judge be equally just? Moderation in a subsistence farming community requires certain qualities of character, moderation in the metropolises of the modern world, though similar, may well require somewhat different qualities of character.

Moving from the ethical to the political, is it not reasonably obvious that decent, thoughtful, virtuous persons may differ on serious matters of public policy? What is a reasonable level of taxation? How much of the national tax revenues should be devoted to national defense how much to education? And with regard to education, what is the right proportion between basic, technical and liberal education? And beyond these matter of public policy are there not reasonable and legitimate differences about the fundamental character of the polity itself? Capitalism and socialism represent two very serious but quite different ways of organizing and governing a modern industrial nation-state. And these are not technical matters to be settled by experts, but serious issues to be deliberated by citizens.

Finally, when we move from the practical (whether individual or communal) to the theoretical, is it not clear that there is a real diversity of perspectives, of ways of looking at and understanding the world? Nature is hardly understood the same way by Aristotle, Thomas, Plato and Kant. And I am not here talking about differences in opinions about scientific matters such as whether or not there was a big bang. These differences are usually settled in time by the appropriate scientific community as it reaches a consensus. I am talking about the fundamentally different ways in which science itself, its procedures, the character of the knowledge it can attain, the qualities of mind necessary to grasp scientific truth, the very nature of reality that science seeks to know--on these matters there has been, there is, and there probably always will be serious and different accounts.

And here is where pluralism in the fully serious sense becomes important, and relativism becomes a danger. It seems to me that given the probably permanent human condition of partial ignorance and partial knowledge we must thread our way very carefully between relativism and dogmatism. Both are, in a sense, councils of despair. Relativism simply accepts the diversity of serious views; it despairs of reconciling the differences between the many serious perspectives on the world and reduces those differences to a matter of taste, as if to prefer Plato to Aristotle is an intellectual equivalent to preferring chicken to steak. The dogmatist (or absolutist, to give him a less pejorative title) responds to the real diversity of substantial views about reality by picking one (for whatever reason) and declaring it to be the (absolute?) truth and all the others simply wrong or evil or misguided or obsolete or whatever. Surely the problem for thoughtful persons is to avoid both these responses. We need to acknowledge the real differences and we need to accept them as a real problem for us, a problem which will not go away. Surely even a convinced Thomist or Aristotelian or Platonist or Kantian can recognize the value of the other philosophical points of view. A Roman Catholic can recognize the genuine piety and religious seriousness of Buddhism and Islam even though he or she rejects their ways of dealing with the divine. And a thoughtful member of any of these faiths can recognize that a non-believing secularist may still be a decent, virtuous human being, even though he may reject any concern for the divine. Berlin, if I understand him, believes that these diverse values are in fundamental and unresolvable disagreement and that we must simply accept that diversity and live with it without attempting to reconcile the differences or choose between them. This seems to me a superficial, though decent way of living with plurality, but it is perilously close to an undiscriminating and easy relativism. We need both to face up to the problems the diversity poses for us, but at the same time to recognize that the diversity enriches us with insights that might not all be attainable from any one of the particular perspectives. Thus, we need the diversity, we have to live with it, and we need to struggle to understand and perhaps transcend it. This is a very complicated and difficult position to maintain, but the facts of human diversity at all levels may require it as a major feature of human excellence.

Herman L. Sinaiko

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